by Otto Penzler
ME: You know how some authors put sex and death together in literature. Why do you think that is?
MACK: Well, I think probably because death is so devastating in our emotions, and sex is so exciting in our emotions. It’s two highs. Or you might call one extreme low and the other high. If you want to get a newspaper, see, the most things that’s written in the newspaper is what gets the headlines, is death-murder or, uh, Clinton got his dick sucked by that girl.
Having finished the movie, now filled with a lonely, hollow pubescent guilt, I go outside. I stand in the blowing dark. Looking down at the brothel, I wonder which of the five whores will share their master’s bed tonight while his bereaved wife sleeps alone 120 miles away. Mostly, I’m disappointed that this man, who panders to those most human conundrums, grief and lust—the very antipodes of the carnal spectrum—a man who possesses a meat-and-potatoes soul if ever there was one, finds the subject of sex and death to be just that, meat and potatoes. When I go to bed I read the grief self-help book I brought. I couldn’t help but notice that the death and dying section is coterminous with the human sexuality section at my Barnes & Noble. This book recommends getting a puppy.
In the morning, after I shower with the heart-shaped soap that I found on the back of the toilet, Shanda cooks me eggs. She is wearing her bowler, and her slippered toes peekaboo like miniature marshmallows. Diane sits at the table smoking and flipping through cookie recipes. It’s going to be a slow day. Almost everyone in the industry refers to prostitutes as girls. But, as it happens, Shanda just became a grandma and Diane has two kids in college. Mack would have you think that Angel’s ladies are the demimonde, but the women I’ve met are worn and mournful. They have the wan charm of (I imagine) the whores of ancient Rome, the bustuariae, sexual servants of the gods of the dead, who made their assignations in cemetery groves. Angel herself, just a few years younger than Mack, is the most weathered. I have yet to spend any time with Angel, but I have gotten to know her, a little, from the photo album in the parlor of her and Mack copulating. It is a plain album, the sort in which you would expect to find vacation photos. A number of pictures include another man having sex with Angel while Mack, pouchy and removed, looks on. In one snapshot, her contorted face looks carved out of grief, but it could be the strain of ecstasy turning her inside out. When Mack comes in with his newspaper, Shanda runs off to dress for a Halloween Fantasy Fetish Ball in Vegas. There are Halloween parties everywhere in Nevada this weekend. Mack will not participate. He is staying in to put the finishing touches on a forty-page missive of gripes, ammunition for his lawyer. Since Mack has work to do, he can’t join me at the Burro Races, the highlight of Beatty Days, this weekend’s celebration of Nevada’s anniversary of statehood (Halloween 1864), but he encourages me to go anyway, saying he’s heard that they’re “sort of funny.” I ask Diane if she wants to go, but Mack answers for her. Of course she can’t. Someone has to be here when the fornicators ring the bell.
High noon finds a crowd around the burro pit, an arena the size of a ballfield, behind the Burro Inn and Casino. Stranded in the center is a rusty oil drum. There are aisles of pickups and spectators roosting on car hoods. We are under a bleak hill painted with a giant white B. Back in the fifties, when Beatty was the closest town to the aboveground nuclear tests, residents gathered at this same spot behind the Burro Inn, nee Atomic Club, in the early morning with lawn chairs and coolers to watch the apocalyptic fireballs light up over the hills. Fortunately, Beatty lies upwind of the Nevada Test Site, and residents have been spared the tragedy that has befallen many downwinders, though, according to the Department of Energy, which tests the town for radionuclides weekly—as often as the girls at Angel’s Ladies are tested for sexually transmitted diseases—the town runs a little hot. In the semi-shade of the announcer’s box, a tin-roofed platform on stilts, are three docile burros tied to the fence. The animals are cute, almost toy-sized, except for their distractingly big genitalia.
Since the species originated in North Africa, the burro adapted quickly to Nevada’s desert climate and made the perfect pack animal for the nomadic prospector. The beasts were thought to be preternaturally “tuned” to precious metals. In fact, the prospector who filed the first claim in Rhyolite was allegedly led to the gold by his own pack of ungulate dowsers.
I grab a spot close to the fence, between a perambulator and a collegiate-looking guy with a camera. There must be two hundred people now, maybe more. A burro wails, just as mournful as Eeyore. There are a number of leathery-armed folk wearing visors that span the visor spectrum from monogrammed cotton to blue sparkle plastic, but more wear cowboy hats. A scruffy-looking guy dressed in suspenders and a sand-dusted crushed hat climbs up onto a tin box and hollers the rules:
All gear must be unpacked and placed neatly on the ground before starting fire or mixing batter.
No sweets or other foods are to be used to assist in leading burros. Pancake must be cooked on both sides. Hold pancake between thumb and forefinger for judge’s approval before it is offered to the burro.
Originally, before harassing wild burros was outlawed, the contestants first had to catch one, which they then led, over the course of three days, about forty miles, not without some violence upon the contestants’ persons. Today, the burros are tame, and the three “prospectors” are students at Beatty High School.
The arena turns to dust the instant the announcer blasts a pistol, and the jockeys launch forward in slow motion. Five minutes into this race nobody has yet inveigled their animal to the oil drum. A rangy kid with baggy shorts and white socks hiked up to his kneecaps—his name is Jeff—gets about a foot before his burro ceases to be persuaded and stops cold. Todd, who looks like the school quarterback, leads by a nose. Dottie, with red streaks in her hair, is first to round the drum, do-si-do. Before Todd even crosses the drum’s lengthening shadow, Dottie has hitched her burro near where a judge sits at one of the three equidistant stations and begun unloading the waiting gear (shovel, matches, kindling, skillet) from its scrawny back. Todd clears the barrel but loses speed on the lee side of the drum. Poor Jeff might as well be trying to persuade a dog to evolve. Just as Todd starts to pack his gear, Dome’s burro sets back out for the second loop around the drum and then back to her station, where she begins to prepare a firepit. Just a fetlock behind, Todd digs a hole the size of a pet’s grave, cracks wood over his knee, and starts striking matches. He contends with wind more than Dot-tie, given that his judge doesn’t block the wind as well as Dome’s judge, deliberately or not, hard to say. Jeff’s judge sits pensively, the shovel and gear unclaimed at her feet. Dot’s judge yells “flame!” but recants when the smoke ends up just being dust kicked up by the burro. Todd takes the lead tenuously; he shelters a weak flame with his hands. Dottie has fire in the hole and it’s a good fire, better than Todd’s.
Dottie warms the skillet while Todd still struggles, blowing. She pours batter. Oops. There’s a problem. The judges huddle. Dottie forgot to oil her pan. For a second it’s unclear if this means disqualification, but they let it slide. The crowd is seized with suspense as Dottie lifts the now nicely browned flapjack to the burro’s muzzle. It takes a sniff. Oddly purses its lips. Then, to the shock of all, the burro bolts backward with a violent capriole. It hates pancakes. The infuriated burro storms across the pen, dragging behind it the terrified girl who is unfortunately connected to the dreaded griddle-cake. Todd patiently oils his pan, pours batter, and proffers the lightly browned flapjack to his burro, who blithely opens its mouth and accepts communion.
Later that afternoon, after Mack’s nap, he and I take a drive in his RAV4 out to Rhyolite. We wind upward to the ghost town, wrapped around the slagged remains of the Bullfrog Hills, past half-dismantled mills, to a sweeping view of the tailings pond, a 340-acre lake of slurry laced with cyanide that reflects the setting sun bluish-greenly. Rhyolite is nothing but ruins. Devoured facades. The wind actually whistles in a creepy minor key. Ancient street signs poke comically out of t
he sagebrush. Just past the once opulent bank, a three-story concrete husk, Mack turns the RAV onto a rutted path, and we bump roughly down Gold Lane, toward the trepanned mountainside. Up close it looks like the burrows of some stygian sparrowlike dirt-hill-dwelling people.
Trundling along here, I find Mack easy company. In this ghost town, speaking about cycles of boom and bust, I ask how well his business rode the New Economy, and it takes us, not as circuitously as you might wish, to the heart of Angel’s grief-lust nexus. Which should have been a good thing. I had been struggling over how to approach the subject. It seemed so obvious, yet delicate, and I was momentarily elated to have an inroad into what I expected would prove to be the key to understanding this central paradox. But the subject bores him. He points out a shack where miners slept. The whores back then kept “cribs,” little huts much like the ancient Roman prostitutes’ cellae, grim mausoleums with the names of each woman etched over the entrance. By my third day with Mack, talking about funeral parlors and sex parlors, sometimes in the same breath, it’s hard not to become confused, so that the tenor of my thoughts is macabre-erotic to the point that I half consciously think of these fallen angels, in turn, as ghosts, necrophilic whores, floozily dressed zombies …
Eleven A.M., Sunday morning, the Beatty Community Church is packed. The church is on a hill, exposed to the raw wind that hasn’t let up since yesterday. (The Fantasy Bungalow creaked like a dinghy all night.) The walls are decorated with Sunday-school handiwork, and the windows are pink-and-blue stained glass. Reverend Taguchi, a brawny Japanese American with longish hair and a goatee, mounts the pulpit. Service starts with three hymns back-to-back (all in F major). I sit out “Blessed Be the Name of the Lord” but, to mark time, sing along with “All Hail, King Jesus.”
After “Unto Thee, O Lord,” everybody gets up to greet and mingle. I am touched, if uneasy, when most come over to shake my hand, all except a strung-out-looking guy who stands in his pew, nodding forlornly. Tucked in his coat is a pit bull puppy.
After the service the guy with the pit bull comes over while I’m waiting for Reverend Taguchi. He sits beside me in the pew and asks my name. His is Walter. For a second it doesn’t look like it’s going to go any further between us and then he starts to cry. Finally he manages to ask if we can go outside. He needs to talk privately. Why not? I follow Walter out to the parking lot. It is blustery. In fact, at that moment I see my first and only tumbleweed. It is a bantam, disappointing little thing that bounces across the parking lot and then wheels out of sight. Walter wants to know if I’m going to Vegas; he needs a ride. But I’m not going back to Vegas for three more days. Walter seems like an imperiled enough character that I briefly consider making a detour for him, but I’ve already spent an afternoon watching the burro races, a detour that led me to no conclusions except that I do not believe a burro would put up with a sport like that if he were conscious of his own mortality. I ask Walt if he worked at the gold mine, and he says that he’s on “disability,” he’s only lived here six months, that he’s from Philadelphia, which I ignore, since I live in Philadelphia and I don’t feel like having anything in common at the moment. Walt starts to cry again when the dog laps his thumb; a meniscus gently swells at the rim of his left nostril. His brow quivers. He really needs to go to Vegas. There’s this model, he says. This is the sad old story, I think, until he says Hobbytown USA, and I gather that it’s a model airplane he’s pining after.
After a potluck lunch Reverend Taguchi invites me over to his house, a block away, a peeling wind-rattled home with chimes dangling on the porch. As a county commissioner who vice-chairs the brothel licensing board, Taguchi, despite his moral qualms, cannot say much about Mack’s case, except that he thinks Beatty will survive just fine without Angel’s if the brothel goes under, so we talk about whether or not Beatty will turn into a ghost town now that the mine’s gone. He thinks not. I ask him again how dependent Beatty is on the revenue of Angel’s, and he brushes it off. He cannot abide the suggestion that his town is in any way dependent on the sinful lucre of merchandised sex. There are plenty of other economic options, he says. Like the Yucca Mountain Project? As for the $38 million that the DOE will have given the county by the time the final site recommendation gets approved by President Bush in 2002, his official position, he grins, as a commissioner, is “neutral.” He’s more eager to talk about the county getting money from Mercedes, BMW, Chevy, and Ford, who all do heat testing in the summertime in Death Valley. “They can actually go from below sea level to 10,000 feet in a two-hour period. The extremes.” When the reverend walks me out the door we find Walt on the porch. He’s still looking for a ride to Hobbytown USA. By the way that Reverend Taguchi kindly sends him on his way, I get the impression that this is an ongoing thing and by refusing I’m not supposed to feel bad, but I can’t help feeling like I should help Walt escape this place, maybe even take him back to Philadelphia, if that’s where he’s really from. Walt is the saddest thing I’ve seen since I got here; sadder than the burros, sadder than the bored whores flipping through cookie recipes. He is clearly bereaved—of what, I know not. But I can help him no more than the aging pimp can help me. When it comes to grief and lust we are all tumbleweeds.
I end up going to Vegas alone. Halloween morning, I meet Mack for the last time at his gated stucco mansion in northwest Vegas. He answers the door wearing a pink shirt and looking five years younger than the last time I saw him. He’s just gone to his “beautician,” he says. His cherubic curls look freshly gilt. Elvis croons in the background. Angel is off somewhere sorting through their returned possessions, which choke the hallway along with chaotic piles of court records, unopened mail, and boxes. Mack says that everything hasn’t been returned by the cops, including some pictures of Angel’s dead boys. When he goes in search of something he wants me to see, I poke around. In every nook and cranny is an Elvis doll, an Elvis telephone, or a tiny Elvis under a bell jar. I’m on my knees looking at a video in an evidence bag when Angel emerges, hovering over me.
Her face pale, her mouth drawn, she looks convalescent. She takes me for a tour of her Elvis collection, down the hallway, where pictures of her boys hang on the wall beside portraits of Elvis, to a back room, where all four walls are covered floor to ceiling with plates from the King’s Franklin Mint collection. There is not enough cake in the world to fill all the plates.
Then for no real reason—other than that I was just nosing around their video collection—Angel starts to tell me about the night that the cops searched her house and kept her hostage in the living room. Her voice quavers, and she clutches the bagged video in her hands the way a woman about to be mugged would clutch her purse. She was alone. Mack was in Beatty. When she thought she would lose it (they wouldn’t let her get her “pressure” pills), she got up and put a video in the VCR. It was a tape her son Jesse had made two months before he died. He wanted it played at the funeral, she says, “mainly to apologize to anybody that he had ever done any wrong thing to.” Her eyes jump when a bird flies past the window; after a long moment, while she struggles not to cry, she says that her son told her on the tape, “If you think that you’re alone, you’re not. He said, It’s going to be all right, Mom. It’s Our Father in Heaven.” I am, I think, convinced when she tells me that the cop guarding her was moved to tears, too.
Mack bustles into the room and, with a pained expression, shows me an official inventory from the police; typed at the top it reads, “Swinging File has been removed from this evidence bag and placed in evidence bag marked employee/record files. Report #: 000578.” This list of potential lovers, Mack lets me know, has not been returned. It makes him mad enough to launch into a hot tirade about suing the bastards. This is a great loss to him. He wants that list back and he cannot quite believe that it is gone. I can see it in his eyes. It is a dire, horrible loss.
For the rest of the day, waiting for my midnight flight, ominously moody because I have to fly, I nap in my room at the Imperial Palace to minimize exp
osure to the Strip and thereby avoid the migrainous hell’s bells and numismatic crepitations of the slots. When the sun goes down I meekly venture out for something to eat. Although it’s Halloween, hardly anyone on the street is in costume. I see the pope hailing a cab. Then I see a hooker in a black velvet cape and a silvery metallic top. I don’t know if she’s a real hooker or not—it doesn’t matter. I stand still until it is all thoroughly convincing. The smell of chlorine from the fountain. The unpared fingernails of the Mexican kid who hands me a flyer for an escort service. The couple that passes and the man who says to his wife: “It beats a sharp stick in the eye!” These details come to life. My life, like the night, seems never-ending.
I was surprised to have the notion brought to my attention—via the happy inclusion of my writing in this very anthology—that I’d written a piece about crime. Mack Moore was a crook, there’s no doubt, and some breaking of the law had inarguably transpired the night he sent the forlorn Cindi on her fateful date at the Stagecoach Hotel, though to this day he insists he did no wrong. What I really wanted to write about was God’s crime against humanity for sticking us with too much grief (and I guess too much lust), and Mack seemed like an apt object lesson. The desert pimp, as I saw him, was a sort of self-destructive Job.